Toxic Masculinity at the End of the World: On David R. Bunch’s ‘Moderan’

1.
“Quaint they were, these records, strange and ancient, washed to shore when the Moderan seas finally unthawed.”

So begins David R. Bunch’s first book, Moderan, which appeared as a paperback original from Avon in 1971. It was to be his only book released by a large publisher during his lifetime, and it was never reprinted in the U.S. until now, when New York Review of Books Classics has brought out a new (and expanded) edition for the first time.

New-metal man! It does have a ring. MODERAN! It did seem pretty great in concept, I’m sure, and, who knows, perhaps it had a reasonable chance for success. But all societies, all civilizations, all aspirations it seems must fail the unremitting tugs of shroudy time, finally, leaving only little bones, fossils, a shoe turned to stone maybe, a bone button in the sea perhaps, a jeweled memento of an old old love.

Moderan collects dozens of brief stories set in a future world apparently destroyed by nuclear bombs, a world where the landscape has been entirely paved over with plastic and the surviving humans have transformed themselves into cyborgs, their bodies mostly replaced with metal, leaving only a few flesh-strips as evidence of their old form. The men with the most metal become warriors whose identity is merged with the Stronghold that houses them, and the pleasure and glory of Moderan is the warring of its Strongholds. (Most of the stories in Moderan focus on Stronghold 10, the best at warring.)

The new-metal men hunker down in their Strongholds and wage war against each other. War is the most exciting thing in everyone’s lives, the way to prove strength and superiority: a force that gives meaning. “Plotting for each the other’s total destruction and coming up with countermeasures to protect each his own new-metal hide at all costs are the kinds of human enterprises that put the human animal up close to godliness.” War lets the Strongholds forget everything but the war, because “amidst the stern havoc, the hard contest demands and all the real problems of carnage, there was not time for either doubt, ghosts, or fears.” War is action, and action allows something almost like joy. “I guess I’m happiest,” Stronghold 10 says, “when I’m in my War Room handing the big orange switch of war to ON and pressing the buttons of launchers. Or, to put it another way, I’m not unhappy or worried or asking questions then—and I’ll settle for that.”

Bunch’s language is unique, sometimes reminiscent of E.E. Cummings, sometimes of Kurt Vonnegut, sometimes of folktales and sacred texts, sometimes of advertising and propaganda. With a breathless tone and many words set in blustery ALL CAPS, the stories present a diction appropriate to the hyperbolic masculinity of Moderan, a world that values only macho strength and aggression. Before their body parts were replaced with metal, Stronghold 10 tells us, humans were weak and vulnerable, susceptible at any moment to injury or death. No more. “I am a Stronghold master, BIG, in the armor plate of total invulnerability. My ammo is stacked in heaps roundabout, and I can win ANY war. My blasters stand itchy on the GO pad, ready, at the speed of a metal thought, to launch for TOTAL SMACK.”

The tone throughout is almost always positive, happy, joyful. This is depressing dystopia presented as thrilling utopia. In substance, Moderan bears similarities to various novels of terrible futures (we might make much fruitful comparison between Bunch’s book and Swastika Night by Katharine Burdekin, for instance), but unlike most such stories, Moderan is not told from the point of view of an outsider or a heretic. Rather like Candide’s Dr. Pangloss, Stronghold 10 and the other narrators love Moderan and think it is the best of all possible worlds, indeed the absolute height of achievement, the end of all progress—nothing could possibly be better.

The book begins with a retrospective introduction that works in some ways like the notes and epilogues of such novels as Nineteen Eighty-Four and The Handmaid’s Tale: it lets us know that however eternal and immutable the systems of the story’s world seemed, they were as mortal as Ozymandias. The march of time cannot be stopped with metal and strongholds. For all their declarations of immortality, the people of Moderan turn out to be as perishable as the rest of us.

In addition to providing an added level of irony, the frame story offered by the opening pages of Moderan allows some freedom in the book’s organization. The original edition organized the stories into three parts: “The Beginnings,” “Everyday Life in Moderan,” and “Intimations of the End”; the NYRB Classics edition adds a fourth section, “Apocrypha from After the End,” which contains Moderan stories (and one poem) Bunch published after 1971. Some of the stories, particularly the first few, lead logically into each other, but most do not. They are like collected folktales or chapters from a future age’s Bible, sometimes repetitive, sometimes contradictory. I expect the book is best appreciated in small doses, a few stories at a time, rather than chugged down all at once. The individual stories, after all, were first published separately over more than 10 years’ time, and there is a certain flatness to the Moderan setting that is both completely appropriate and narratively limiting. Many of the stories work like inverted picaresques, with, instead of a protagonist wandering off to learn about the world, someone coming to learn something about Moderan and the strongholds. Thematically, this works well, making the monotony of Moderan’s monoculture palpable, but it can be trying for a reader. (In many ways, the most compelling sections of the book are the second and fourth, which are the least uniform in their topics, settings, and narrators.)

Some readers have always found Bunch trying, even in small doses. In a letter published in the May 1961 issue of Fantastic Stories of Science Fiction, a Mrs. Alvin R. Stuart of San Saba, Texas, wrote: “It is downright disgusting to read the rest of the magazine and think, with pleasant anticipation, ‘Good! There’s one more story I haven’t read!’—and then, upon turning to the page, to find such utter rot as this author—and I use the term doubtfully—has been submitting. Some of it reads like something written by a mental patient or a moron.”

2.
In the early 1960s, Bunch’s byline started appearing regularly in Fantastic and its companion, Amazing Stories of Science Fiction, both edited by Cele Goldsmith. Goldsmith remains one of the most extraordinary and undersung editors in science fiction’s history; her taste was broad and eclectic, and she welcomed work that other editors considered a bit too odd. Mike Ashley (perhaps the most knowledgeable historians of science fiction magazines) has written that

Of the authors who debuted in the middle period of Goldsmith’s editorship, four stand out: Roger Zelazny, Thomas M. Disch, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Piers Anthony. There is little doubt that science fiction owes a debt to Cele Goldsmith for putting these writers on the road. All of them had already tried to sell professionally—Le Guin had submitted a story to Amazing as far back as 1939—but none of them had found an editor appreciative of their talents. Only Goldsmith saw through the fantastic trimmings to the creative core…

Though he had sold a few stories to other SF editors, he became a fixture at Amazing and Fantastic throughout Goldsmith’s tenure, allowing him to make a longterm transition from small (often regional) literary journals to the larger audience of science fiction readers. He soon found another champion: Judith Merril, who reprinted him in her annual Best SF of the Year collections, and who asked him for recommendations of literary magazines that she might find material in—advice that helped change Merril’s anthologies from good but genre-bound collections to books with a breadth that still, more than 50 years later, remains nearly unique.

I think it is no coincidence that some of Bunch’s earliest champions were women, and women readers continued to respond particularly well to his work through the years. In the desperate, patriarchal militarism of the 1960s, Bunch’s stories foresaw two tendencies that, many years later, scholar Susan Jeffords identified pervading contemporary American culture: the post-Vietnam “remasculinization” of the warrior image and the fetishization of “hard bodies” as a manly ideal.

Hypermasculinity in Moderan isn’t limited to individual bodies. Now, humans can give the entire planet a hard body:

As it whirls the world in space our planet stands out bold now and surely indestructible, coated as we have plasto-coated it, with nothing to grind it away at the big middle and nothing to wear it out at the far hubs. […] I am harder than the stones were and more mind-set than the animals. SCIENCE HAS MADE A MAN! NEW METAL MAN! Science has coated and made clean the dirty EARTH ball for him to stand on.

An obsession with masculine strength and dominance is vital for warring, but the ideology of the warmongers infects every other aspect of society, turning science into a weapon for the destruction of everything perceived to be weak. The Earth itself cannot survive a world of hypermasculine warriors.

This hypermasculine caricature additionally contains a caricature of the misogynistic trope of the shrewish wife. The New Metal Men haven’t simply hidden themselves in strongholds to protect against missiles and bombs—they have also fled marriage, domesticity, and femininity, like weaponized versions of Robert Bly’s Iron John. Stronghold 10’s wife survives the operation to replace most of her body with metal, and now her husband fears her more than he has feared any attacks from other strongholds. He and the other strongholds see nothing but nagging and emasculation:

All over Moderan that spring, when we were beginners-new and the plans not set-mold, they came walking in, struggling, falling down, getting up to come on, most of them with one aim to view — not to let that disappearing surviving rat husband get away with a thing. I’M YOUR WIFE, seemed, in their minds, to say it all and leave no questions of any kind. Doom was final; doom was sealed-down doom. That gray twilight terror-life of wife-husband husband-wife (WEEAAOOOHH YEEAAOOOHH OOHH OHH) must never be changed, not even by the ending of a world.

The men, having achieved the strength they so desired in their Strongholds, are now free to do with their wives what they always wanted: “We formed a Commission for the Relocation of old New-Metal shrews. We moved them to a place prepared for them, the walled province of White Witch Valley. The walls are high there; it is a prison, vast and maximum-security….”

Misogyny, militarism, and ecological apocalypse go together, with the strong men asserting their right to dominate a natural world viewed as feminine and weak, and therefore worthless. Women and landscapes that don’t bow to the men’s utter domination are deemed enemy combatants, obstacles to be destroyed or remade. Not only do the rulers of Moderan cover the world with plastic, but they also create plastic flowers that can be programmed to appear during certain seasons. The new-metal men seek to eradicate everything alive and replace a few items with artificial stand-ins, things easier to control than the unpredictable, other-than-human inhabitants of the wild. With narcissistic force, they blast and plasticize the world until it resembles their shallow ideal.

In a 1966 issue of the literary journal The Smith (which included the Moderan story “The Miracle of the Flowers”), a one-line biographical note declares that David R. Bunch “is a cartographer who maps madness.” This was not a metaphor only: Bunch worked for the U.S. military’s cartographic agency in the era of the Vietnam war. Mapping military madness was his day job.

3.
In an August 1971 letter to Ursula K. Le Guin, James Tiptree, Jr. (Alice Sheldon) said, “David Bunch just sent me his new Moderan book, a mean treat. I’ve long felt he was one of the most undersung and ill-known landmarks in sf…not much beam-width compared say to Cordwainer Smith but oh what intensity at the focus, what idiosyncrasy, what a one roaring diamond glimpse…” Tiptree’s instincts seem accurate: both the comparison to one of science fiction’s other great oddballs, Cordwainer Smith (I would also add R.A. Lafferty), and the sense that with the Moderan stories, at least, there isn’t a lot of “beam-width” but lots of intensity and idiosyncrasy. Bunch’s non-Moderan stories do show more range of subject matter and style, and he published in a tremendous variety of venues—not only science fiction magazines but also literary journals, including Gordon Lish’s Genesis West, where his byline appeared alongside those of Ken Kesey, Donald Barthelme, Jack Gilbert, and LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka).

Yet Tiptree was right; there is a narrowness to Bunch’s beam regardless of topic or venue. I’m not sure it could be otherwise. He was as interested in poetry as in fiction, and he seems to have approached fiction like poetry, seeking a kind of poetic compression within and between his sentences. The intensity and idiosyncracy are always there, and the poetic compression adds a feeling of density, too. The Moderan stories tell of a world that is trying with all its might to narrow itself into one way of being, a world where ways of living are no more diverse than the plastic that covers the landscape. At times, the stories can feel monotonous in their obsessions, or obsessive in their monotony. It is not that Bunch’s own vision is narrow, but that he depicts a world of ever-narrowing visions, a world where imagination responds only to violence and complexity has died in the rituals of war. Read one or two stories and they seem funny, quirky, jaunty in their satire. Read the whole book, and the full weight of the apocalypse bears down, the full sense of all that is lost, and what was once amusingly odd begins to reveal a dark, hollowed-out core, and laughter starts to catch in your throat.

Other writers would try to make us feel the horrors of this world through sympathetic characters and stories carefully arced toward sentiment. We would know this is a bad world because we would feel pity and fear for the characters we cared about. That is not this book. Throughout his career, Bunch showed no interest in the sorts of scene building and character development essential to social realism and popular fiction. His inclinations were toward much older forms of storytelling, toward myths and folktales and children’s stories, toward archetypes and allegories. (It is best, perhaps, to think of Moderan as a kind of science fictional Decameron or Canterbury Tales.) In the latter half of the 20th century, there were few homes for such writing other than the science fiction magazines, because science fiction thrives on mythic heroes and archetypal situations. Just as importantly, science fiction developed its own style of compressed language, one hospitable to neologisms and to quick gestures that could suggest entire worlds. For a reader of SF, the narrator’s statement on the first page of Moderan of being one of “the beam people, the Essenceland Dream people” is par for the course and sparks a quick imagining of creatures that are somehow composed of energy rather than bodies. Because this is SF, there’s no expectation that Bunch will now explain all the details of beam people—that might have been the expectation in 1926, when Hugo Gernsback first launched Amazing Stories as a way for people to learn about science while they read tales of adventure, but by mid-century, SF’s aesthetic assumptions had developed enough for exposition-heavy stories to be considered clunky. Instead, readers thrilled for off-kilter details that suggested new worlds, and writers such as Robert Heinlein had, in the decade or two before Bunch began publishing, refined techniques for making the most of such details while also keeping a story humming along with exciting plots and characters who conformed to concepts of human behavior and representation developed in the 19th century and promulgated through countless short stories and novels.

In many ways, it was into science fiction (and its related popular genres) that myths and folktales found themselves repackaged in the wake of the 18th century’s rationalism and the 19th century’s storytelling innovations. By putting the techniques of modern science fiction to use in older structures, though, Bunch threw a wrench into his stories’ engines. The effect is, appropriately, a kind of modernism where the expectations common to one form collide with the expectations of another, re-invigorating both. As readers, it’s hard to get our bearings, because everything is both familiar and new: we know how to read old myths and folktales, we know how to read science fiction, we know how to read the language of self-help manuals and advertisements and jingoistic propaganda—but do we know how to read them all together at once?

Perhaps we are ready for David R. Bunch now. Our literature is saturated with dystopias; our news is filled with blustering men who seem to want nothing so much as a stronghold from which to war, war, war; our landscape is covered in plastic. The all-caps exclamations don’t seem out of place in a world of war criminals’ tweetstorms. Discourses intermingle endlessly: yesterday’s satire is today’s business headline, political arguments sound like dulled-down Dr. Seuss, and children’s stories include shelter-in-place instructions. Moderan is catching up to us, or we’re catching up to it. What once seemed so strange as to be almost unreadable now stands inches from the de rigueur.

It is a testament to literary progress that we have reached a point where we might more fully appreciate the achievement of David R. Bunch, but it is a condemnation of the damned human race that each passing decade has leached his stories of their bitter surrealism to the extent that now they may be read as reports on the real.

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